Hmmm....the data object is deleted but I'll check to make sure that it's removing the graphical object. It wasn't in a save game was it? I found and fixed a bug yesterday where you couldn't select a planet in a loaded game that had been selected when the game was saved, so it could be related to that.

Edit: the code sends the message to remove the graphic object, so I'm not sure what's happening. If you have a save game that can reproduce this, that would be save me the time of trying to reproduce it myself.

Instead of removing these ships, could they be turned into the little asteroids of GC1 and let a survey ship come along and hotwire them. However the cargo should be removed.

But that brings up another issues. Should a species that loses its last planet, but has loaded troop transports or colony ships truly be dead?

But that brings up another issues. Should a species that loses its last planet, but has loaded troop transports or colony ships truly be dead?

I think that would depend on whether they could be considered captured, surrendered, or just drifting in space without anyplace to resupply resources for survival. In all of these cases, the race no longer has a viable government.

Until supplies run out, someone distroys their ship, someone captures them, etc. etc. etc.... Or even rescued. Hhhmmm. Makes for an interesting side item. Race xxx looses its last planet but the government manages to escape in a colony ship (rather far fetched, so the odds in the game that this would happen would have to be high), they get rescued by another race, start a government in exile, .... hhhmmm. similar events have happened in our real world.

*$64 million question*
But does it add anything of any real value to the game play.

Range is no longer going to be based on influence, but on the distance from your nearest colony.

I forgot about starbases. Allowing a planet-less race to continue so long as it has a starbase is an interesting idea, and I don't think it would be bad; starbases are sitting targets just like planets, and since they require expensive constructors and maintenance, there wouldn't be too many of them. So long as a race cannot remain in the game through ships alone, I think allowing a race to stay in the game up to any other point would be fine.

Star Bases do not depend on supplies just as ships do, Lucky Jack. For proof, note that star bases have 0 maintenance/upkeep in the actual GC design. That means they are self sufficent. They need food? They build a few farm modules to grow their own. Atmosphere? Not significant. Atmosphere is included in the set up costs, and then loses are so low that I doubt they need regular shipments. Unlike our primitive space stations... which have to ship up Oxy because we cannot clean and recycle our own internal atmosphere on the space stations, yet. But given a sufficent volume of green zoning, we could at our primitive atmospheric tech.

Since Star Bases don't actually produce shields, but rather enhance world based shield production, they are management and distribution centers with no governmental industry base to speak of. But they must have some local industry capability, just to maintain themselves.

Personally, I think star bases should be changed to being simple artificial worlds. You build a star base, and that constructor turns into your colony start tile. You can then expend some money/resources and build a tile of labs or farms or whatever. As your engineering techs go up, you'd raise the limit of tilage you can have per star base. And you could balance the whole thing out by giving each tileage a higher maintenance cost, so that it isn't economical to start building "flying cities" in space until a particular tech point or set of tech points.

The advantage of this would be that you could build space facilities which are focused on particular things. A culture base would be a star base which has plenty of culture/influence generators. A money generator would be a base purely with farms and banks. A military base would have all the military tileage facilities. A research base would be loaded with labs. Star Dock could actually reuse their planetary screens and AI/Governors for you to handle star bases. They'd have a cost, be subject to cultural and military takeover, and also could be targetted for destruction.

And you will be able to retask a starbase. That early starbase you built on the edge of your empire at the time to give you a bit of range to reach a minor and that was a military facitlity because you are planning on trouble with the Drengin just past that minor? Later, after you've conquered the Drengin, you can retask it to be a research base or a income generator instead.

Star dock then doesn't have to worry about "piling up" the bonuses like in GC1. And the AI can handle them much better, because it does better handling worlds. The AI would be able to do long term strategic planning... planning to build research bases (and add tax generators when it gets low on cash), and planning on building Culture projectors.

Of course, we would have to eliminate all of the alien's starbases then. They could have a couple of starbases out there, where one generates the money to cover itself and a stardock loaded construction base. Of course, that would take a long time to build anything (you don't get the high tileage count on a starbase as you do on high class worlds), but it would be concievable that a race could use that to leverage up via the invade minors then invade weaker civs. So a lurking threat.

The game could gain though... imagine that instead of just a bunch of random pirates get scattered across the map, that a pirate event generates one or two pirate starbases! The pirate "clan" could then get up to all sorts of trouble, and slowly build a space based empire that eventually would cause you to have to hunt them down. Or they might invade your worlds.

Other game events could be that a race's space cities rebel, and form their own civ (think space oriented fundy type events). Civil war anyone? New people to wheel and deal?

Just some thoughts of how having starbases treated like small worlds could potentially add to our fun. Once governors are implemented, they would then have the same minor amount of MM that most worlds have. Something to think about, isn't it?

That sounds more like artificial planets (for which there is a tech) than star bases. (There is also a tech for artificial satalites --- moons --- but in GC1 and GC/OS2 neither of these techs gave you anything except a path to another tech.)

With all of the tilage you want to put on star bases it sounds like you want artificial planets.

Building artificial planets (and artificial moon sized satalites) should take much more material than is ultimately contained in them. So where would you get all of that material?

since they require expensive constructors and maintenance, there wouldn't be too many of them.

Are you kidding? My friend and I were playing a game when we conquered every-single-square (big squares) with a constructor in each on medium difficulty.


We should be able to have some star bases that could be the last of a race. One starbase should be able to have as many things as ships, such as living quarters. An entire civilization could live off that for a few years before they either die or get rescued.

On GC1 it was unusual for me to construct my last star base for less than 8,000 bc.

Starbases have been tweaked in the latest version of GC1 to:
- prevent every swuare to be filled with starbase
- increase the costs of new starbases, based of the number of starbases you already own.

I don't know what version Imtotolin was using.

Star Bases went through several tweaks in GC1. Originally, they didn't cost you anything to build nor to maintain. Since all star base benefits stacked, this meant that the most efficent strategy was to cram ever square of your core world sectors with production enhancing starbases, so you could build the big ships faster... and your smaller worlds could build the constructors faster, which let you futher enhance your position faster. And once you've got constructors popping off every few turns to every turn, you can really enhance your position. In games of serious size, creating a "shipapult" sector where every starbase is loaded with the +2 move allowed players to quickly dispatch their big ships in just a turn across huge swaths of the map. If you stacked up your military bonuses, then even your excess colony ships were incredible war machines in your star based sectors, due to the high attack and defense bonuses. Interestingly, you didn't bother with loading all your star bases with culture modules, because if you did, the culture bonues multiplied per star base, rather then added (like everything else). So just 8 or 10 star bases in your home sector maxxed out were enough to take over the galaxy, regardless of map size.

Of course, telling all the constructros where to go was just tiresome. And picking out what module they were enhancing was just another pin stabbed into your fun. And it was very cheesy... building 15 star bases in your homeworld sector so you could build an avatar in 1 turn. So, Brad and friends started tweaking star bases, rather then just make it so only the biggest bonus from any base in a sector applied. See, the game needed to have production enhancement, to allow players to get the big ships in a reasonable amount of time. Large empire economics depended on you having trade routes, and star bases allowed players to enhance their trade economics so that they didn't have to find the maximum route, every time (this enabling players to employ strategic trading, or just not worry about maximizing every time). If SD had made it so only a single bonus applied, the game would have be less enjoyable to a lot of the customers.

Eventually, they came up with a growing cost to build NEW star bases, as well as a minimum distance between starbases, so that players could still have a few high production core sectors to get their big ships, but wouldn't be able to turn a class 10 world into one that could theoretically make 20 avatars a turn (but only made 1 a turn due to game production mechanics). SD could drop the set up cost completely, and still retain the same actual game play, as the growing cost is almost always offset by the trade enhancements players will stack up at concentration points. You might have to turn off your spending for a whole turn or two, but by then, you are making things so quickly, the computer still cannot catch up if you didn't produce another ship for 40 more turns.

Star Dock has told us that they are keeping the old star base system, and just making one change. They are no longer going to allow us to mix module types on our stations. So, resource mining stations can only mine. Production enhancers will only enhance production. Culture magnifiers will only do culture, trade enhancers will only do trade, and military will only be applicable on military bases. But, to make up for the change, they are going to give us research bases, which will presumably enhance research locally, as everything else enhance things locally. Of course, the actual effect is that player choice is being limited, and it doesn't take a pyshic to know what the exact effect of that will be. When players have to prioritze star base effect, that means that they will never have to make a hard choice. It is too cut and dried whats best, where, when.

It seems to me, that's just another sign that star bases are broken, and that Star Dock needs to toss out the old way and implement something that will be fun, require less micro-management, and allow for better strategizing as well as provide for retasking of a star base as your strategy changes. Since they are revamping the way worlds work, to make worlds more unique and allow for better strategizing by players, I think they should apply that to star bases as well. Then, every starbase will be unique, will have its MM cut down by the same system that handles worlds, and the AI should actually know what to do with them then. GC1's AI, while very good in other areas, is terrible at handling star bases. If the AI handles star bases much better in GC2, then that will be a better game for everyone.